Late last week, Nokia dropped what many consider to be a bomb on the WebM project: a list of patents that VP8 supposedly infringes in the form of an IETF IPR declaration. The list has made the rounds around the web, often reported as proof that VP8 infringes upon Nokia's patents. All this stuff rang a bell. Haven't we been here before? Yup, we have, with another open source codec called Opus. Qualcomm and Huawei made the same claims as Nokia did, but they turned out to be complete bogus. As it turns out, this is standard practice in the dirty business of the patent licensing industry.

"Well, aside from making very little sense of mixing two orthogonal properties in a kind of comparison (one being about productising, the other one being about code licensing), I'd rather say the other way around.

A developer commericializing a patented technology is more likely to be sued by patent holders then one not doing so. Whether the software in question is open source or not doesn't change much.

What I meant is that with commercial software you don't get to see how something got implemented, as such it is hard to come with arguments to sue a given company.
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No being able to see how something is implemented strikes me to be a result of software sources being not available, not as result of being commercial.

In any case, patents like those for codecs are applied to all possible implementations, so it really doesn't matter how someone implements the codec.

You don't need to source of software to see that it is capable of encoding or decoding in a certain format and it makes no difference either if the software was paid for or distributed free of cost.

Of course, even commercial software is not free of being sued based on the L&F of a given application or using unlicensed APIs or protocols.

No software is, commercial or non-commercial, open source or closed source.

With open source, you can get patent trolls going through the code and trying to find situations that they can leverage for patents. SCO's case for example.

Even if we assume that this is so, how does it make commerical software less targetable. This seems to be about reading the source, not having paid for the product.
Or do you assume that the EULA would contain clauses that forbid using anything found in the sources?

They just need to raise the doubt that the software might break the patents. If the community cannot support a court case, they win.

Sure, but some communities, e.g. IBM, Micosoft, Apple, Oracle, Google and so on are likely to be able to do.

As we have seen in the SCO vs. IBM case, they were and SCO lost. Everything.